If you regard honesty and humility as virtues, which I think most Iowans do, his ridiculous boasts demand derision. He’s the business genius who brags about screwing his investors and who has declared bankruptcy as often as some people overdraw their checking account. He sports the world’s silliest comb-over and makes fun of other people’s looks. He’s the tough guy who never served in the military, never risked his life or his interests for anyone other than himself, and disparaged the service of a decorated veteran.
He promises to make America great again and rejects the ideals and decency that made us great in the first place. Trump isn’t a fascist. He just says stupid, offensive things, seems unaware we have a Bill of Rights, and surrounds himself with aides who appear to have graduated first in their class at the Baghdad Bob School of Awesome Ass Kissing. Fascism is an ideology. Self-aggrandizement isn’t. -Mark Salter, Esquire
(Psychologist Howard) Gardner said, “For me, the compelling question is the psychological state of his supporters. They are unable or unwilling to make a connection between the challenges faced by any president and the knowledge and behavior of Donald Trump. In a democracy, that is disastrous.” (from Is Donald Trump Actually a Narcissist? Therapists Weigh In! Henry Alford, Vanity Fair)
Trump is a masterful pitchman on behalf of his own self-interest because of the way he helps his supporters unconsciously understand that their own self-interests are impotent. I attribute his ability then to seal the deal with slabs of (Girardian) scapegoating to his insecurity, especially his sexual insecurity.
(Trump from the perspective of my own sense of cultural complexes represents the realization of the shadow of the so-called neoreaction.)
Logos domination can lead to a degree of detsruction only hinted at by chthonic phallos behavior. The highest potential of masculine solar consciousness–spirituality, intellectual and institutional leadership–can tyrannize whatever is considered to be in error, whoever cannot “measure up” (an oblique reference to the interest males have in phallic size.) The tyranny is all the more devastating due to the cultural admiration of solar masculine attributes, behind which the shadow qualities fester. (Eugene Monick, Phallos, Sacred Image of the Masculine, Inner City Books)
It’s worth noting that in the psychological sense, given somewhat old fashioned ways of framing such phenomena, there is a strong cultural complex at work in our society that has to do with the unconscious restoration of phallic power. For the purpose of observing this we can look to Trump’s ‘priapic’ approach as being the natural attractor for the unconscious projections of the contemporary wilted masculine, and, the impotence of its various white-skinned tribes.
For me, it seems obvious that Trump is carrying the projection that makes of him the greatest vigilante possible: one issued by and sprung from tired pale loins. Revenge, finally revenge! Trump is the daddy who solves the problem and never asks question later; or, as Trump has put it, “People won’t like what it is necessary to do.”
As Dr. Carl Jung noted, ‘if you stack enough rifles in a warehouse they will go off all by themselves.’
The fantasy of the good guy shooting the bad guy is, obviously in these terms, a sexual fantasy, and the only possible result in the collective sense is the eventual orgy of badly aimed money shots; shots hopelessly exploded for the unconscious sake of gaining a moment of tumescent identity.
As I like to put it: the dream of being an effective vigilante requires a great deal of unconsciousness, and, a ‘swollen head.’
Then there are the urgings of the holler:
If there is more risky intrapsychic group attitude than that which attaches to another person’s parental persona mixed up with a sexualized complex, I’m unaware of it. This group’s ideational scaffolding to get to the point of supporting Trump is, in a word, frightening. That this evidently is evoked by the deeply energized unconscious misogyny of Trump has me hope this collision between one man’s shadow and collective won;t have any staying power.
